The Japanese Sculptor Who Dedicated His Life to Finishing Gaudí’s Magnum Opus, the Sagrada Família

in Architecture, Film | August 24th, 2020

“Ven­go de Japón.” With those words Japan­ese sculp­tor Etsuro Sotoo intro­duces him­self to us in “Stone Cut,” the short film from NOWNESS above. Since com­ing to Barcelona in 1978, Sotoo has not just mas­tered the Span­ish lan­guage but con­vert­ed to Roman Catholi­cism and ded­i­cat­ed much of his life to labor­ing on the com­ple­tion of the most famous build­ing in Spain: Antoni Gaudí’s mag­num opus, the Basíli­ca de la Sagra­da Família. Not that it was quite so revered when Sotoo first encoun­tered it: “Back in the day, no one real­ly cared about Sagra­da Famil­ia,” he says. “There were stones and rub­ble, but it was most­ly an aban­doned ruin. This sit­u­a­tion last­ed many decades.” 

Even the young Sotoo him­self had no inter­est in the archi­tect of Sagra­da Famil­ia, but “back then it was manda­to­ry to know Gaudí’s name. Slow­ly, my inter­est in Gaudí start­ed to grow in me. And today it keeps grow­ing.” As it should: for more than 40 years now, Sotoo has worked to com­plete what Gaudí left unfin­ished at the time of his death in 1926, a decade before the out­break of the Span­ish Civ­il War. That bit­ter con­flict not only put a stop to the con­struc­tion of Sagra­da Famil­ia for near­ly two decades, it also dam­aged what had already been built: the sculp­tures of its Por­ta del Rosari, for exam­ple, which it has fall­en to Sotoo to restore.

Sculp­tures con­sti­tute much of the elab­o­rate dec­o­ra­tion of Sagra­da Famil­i­a’s exte­ri­or and inte­ri­or, both of which present the view­er with nary a straight line nor a flat sur­face. Even in the incom­plete build­ing, the effect is at once organ­ic and oth­er­world­ly. “Gaudí is way beyond where we are today,” says Sotoo, and his film­mak­ing coun­try­man Hiroshi Teshi­ga­hara must have shared that sen­ti­ment, hav­ing paid trib­ute to the archi­tect with a wor­ship­ful 1984 doc­u­men­tary. The project of real­iz­ing the archi­tec­t’s unprece­dent­ed aes­thet­ic vision — the result of a con­ver­sa­tion “with God about some­thing very big and pro­found” — con­tin­ues to this day, 138 years after the com­mence­ment of its con­struc­tion, which moved slow­ly even dur­ing Gaudí’s life­time. “My client,” his­to­ry remem­bers him hav­ing said, “is not in a hur­ry.”

The cur­rent push to com­plete Sagra­da Famil­ia has a more press­ing dead­line: the year 2026, the cen­te­nary of Gaudí’s death, at which time less than a quar­ter of the project was com­plete. (You can see a 3D ren­der­ing of the remain­der of the process in this video from the Sagra­da Famil­ia Foun­da­tion, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.) But that time frame only cov­ers com­ple­tion of the struc­ture, includ­ing the eigh­teen spires Gaudí envi­sioned as rep­re­sent­ing the Twelve Apos­tles, the Vir­gin Mary, the four Evan­ge­lists, and Jesus Christ. The dec­o­ra­tive ele­ments should be fin­ished by the ear­ly 2030s, grant­i­ng more breath­ing room to arti­sans like Sotoo — who, hav­ing spent four-decades being reshaped by Gaudí him­self, knows that archi­tec­tur­al genius can’t be rushed.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Antoni Gaudí’s Unfin­ished Mas­ter­piece, the Sagra­da Família, Get Final­ly Com­plet­ed in 60 Sec­onds

The Isamu Noguchi Muse­um Puts Online an Archive of 60,000 Pho­tographs, Man­u­scripts & Dig­i­tized Draw­ings by the Japan­ese Sculp­tor

A Vir­tu­al Time-Lapse Recre­ation of the Build­ing of Notre Dame (1160)

An Intro­duc­tion to Hagia Sophia: After 85 Years as a Muse­um, It’s Set to Become a Mosque Again

The His­to­ry of West­ern Archi­tec­ture: A Free Course Mov­ing from Ancient Greece to Roco­co

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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A New Interactive Map Shows All Four Million Buildings That Existed in New York City from 1939 to 1941

in Architecture, History, Maps, Photography, Travel | August 19th, 2020

New York­ers have borne wit­ness to a notice­able uptick in the num­ber of shiny, new build­ings going up in the city over the last few years, crowd­ing the water­front, ris­ing from the ash­es of com­mu­ni­ty gar­dens and old­er, infi­nite­ly more mod­est struc­tures.

Their devel­op­ers have tak­en care to top load them with luxu­ry ameni­ties—rooftop cabanas, 24-hour fit­ness clubs, mar­ble coun­ter­tops, screen­ing rooms.

But one thing they can’t pro­vide is the sense of lived his­to­ry that imbues every old build­ing with a true sense of char­ac­ter, mys­tique, and oft-grub­by charm.

I fear that the occu­pants of these new­er build­ings won’t have near­ly as much fun as the rest of us search­ing for our cur­rent address­es on the NYC Munic­i­pal Archives’ inter­ac­tive map, above.

Every dot rep­re­sents a Works Progress Admin­is­tra­tion pho­to­graph of a New York City build­ing, snapped between 1939 and 1941 as a means of stan­dard­iz­ing the way in which prop­er­ty val­ues were assessed and record­ed.

There are 4,282,000 dots, spread out between five bor­oughs.

Does that sound dense­ly packed?

You should see it today… there’s been a lot of ver­ti­cal build.

This unas­sum­ing fuel oil plant near Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal has giv­en way to a 430-unit build­ing boast­ing a yoga room, spin stu­dios, and valet ser­vices for those in need of dry-clean­ing, laun­dry, apart­ment clean­ing, or dog walking…though sad­ly, no on-premis­es motor oil. We find that omis­sion some­what sur­pris­ing for such a full-ser­vice res­i­den­tial devel­op­ment on the banks of a Super­fund site, whose clean up is esti­mat­ed to tip the scales at $500 mil­lion.

We also won­der what the occu­pants of the above build­ings would have made of the glassy 25-sto­ry com­plex that opened on their coor­di­nates ear­li­er this year. Is it just us, or does it seem a bit disin­gen­u­ous of its devel­op­ers to trum­pet that its loca­tion is “the epit­o­me of New York City’s authen­tic­i­ty, with over a cen­tu­ry of rich his­to­ry, where the world’s sar­to­r­i­al and culi­nary trends are born”?

(You can find us a few blocks away mut­ter­ing into our chopped liv­er at Russ and Daugh­ters, a ven­er­a­ble food shop that looks much the same today as it did in 1940, though you’ll have to con­firm with a bit of research on your own if you don’t want to take our word for it, the WPA “dot” reveal­ing lit­tle more than a man with a stick and sev­er­al mov­ing vehi­cles.)

Our final stop is one of many archi­tec­tur­al ghosts to haunt the Hud­son Yards colos­sus, the self-described “epi­cen­ter of Manhattan’s New West Side… a bea­con for cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als, a hub for fash­ion, design, com­mu­ni­ca­tions and art.” In addi­tion to a much reviled $200 mil­lion shawar­ma-shaped “3‑dimensional pub­lic space” and state of the art wine fridges, ameni­ties now include diag­nos­tic and anti­body test­ing “per­formed by top med­ical pro­fes­sion­als.”

It’s telling that in the sum­mer of 2020, prospec­tive ten­ants were offered incen­tives includ­ing two months’ free rent and a $2,000 gift card.

Proof, per­haps, that New York will con­tin­ue as it always has—a city in con­stant flux. The preva­lence of mod­ern high rise build­ings in dystopi­an fic­tion gives us pause.…

Explore the Street View of 1940s New York here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Behold the New York City Street Tree Map: An Inter­ac­tive Map That Cat­a­logues the 700,000 Trees Shad­ing the Streets of New York City

New York Pub­lic Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Down­load and Use

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets You Down­load 180,000 Images in High Res­o­lu­tion: His­toric Pho­tographs, Maps, Let­ters & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Wine Windows of Renaissance Florence Dispense Wine Safely Again During COVID-19

in Architecture, Food & Drink, History, Life, Travel | August 10th, 2020

Every­thing old is new again and Tuscany’s buchette del vino—wine windows—are def­i­nite­ly rolling with the times.

As Lisa Har­vey ear­li­er report­ed in Atlas Obscu­ra, buchette del vino became a thing in 1559, short­ly after Cosi­mo I de’ Medici decreed that Flo­rence-dwelling vine­yard own­ers could bypass tav­erns and wine mer­chants to sell their prod­uct direct­ly to the pub­lic. Wealthy wine fam­i­lies eager to pay less in tax­es quick­ly fig­ured out a workaround that would allow them to take advan­tage of the edict with­out requir­ing them to actu­al­ly open their palace doors to the rab­ble:

Any­one on the street could use the wood­en or met­al knock­er … and rap on a wine win­dow dur­ing its open hours. A well-respect­ed, well-paid ser­vant, called a can­ti­niere and trained in prop­er­ly pre­serv­ing wine, stood on the oth­er side. The can­ti­niere would open the lit­tle door, take the customer’s emp­ty straw-bot­tomed flask and their pay­ment, refill the bot­tle down in the can­ti­na (wine cel­lar), and hand it back out to the cus­tomer on the street.

Sev­en­ty years fur­ther on, these lit­er­al holes-in-the-walls served as a means of con­tact­less deliv­ery for post-Renais­sance Ital­ians in need of a drink as the sec­ond plague pan­dem­ic raged.

Schol­ar Francesco Rondinel­li (1589–1665) detailed some of the extra san­i­ta­tion mea­sures put in place in the ear­ly 1630s:

A met­al pay­ment col­lec­tion scoop replaced hand-to-hand exchange

Imme­di­ate vine­gar dis­in­fec­tion of all col­lect­ed coins

No exchange of emp­ty flasks brought from home

Cus­tomers who insist­ed on bring­ing their own reusable bot­tles could do self-serve refills via a met­al tube, to pro­tect the essen­tial work­er on the oth­er side of the win­dow.

Sound famil­iar?

After cen­turies of use, the win­dows died out, falling vic­tim to flood, WWII bomb­ings, fam­i­ly relo­ca­tions, and archi­tec­tur­al ren­o­va­tion.

The nov­el coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic has def­i­nite­ly played a major role in putting wine win­dows back on the public’s radar, but Babae, a casu­al year-old restau­rant gets cred­it for being the first to reac­ti­vate a dis­used buchet­ta del vino for its intend­ed pur­pose, sell­ing glass­es of red for a sin­gle hour each day start­ing in August 2019.

Now sev­er­al oth­er authen­tic buchette have returned to ser­vice, with menus expand­ed to accom­mo­date serv­ings of ice cream and cof­fee.

Giv­en this suc­cess, per­haps they’ll take a cue from Japan’s 4.6 mil­lion vend­ing machines, and begin dis­pens­ing an even wider array of items.

They may even take a page from the past, and send some of the mon­ey they take in back out, along with food and yes—wine—to sus­tain needy mem­bers of the com­mu­ni­ty.

The Buchette del Vino Asso­ci­azi Cul­tur­ale cur­rent­ly lists 146 active and inac­tive wine win­dows in Flo­rence and the sur­round­ing regions, accom­pa­ny­ing their find­ings with pho­tos and arti­cles of his­tor­i­cal rel­e­vance.

Via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Quar­an­tined Ital­ians Send a Mes­sage to Them­selves 10 Days Ago: What They Wish They Knew Then

Ital­ians’ Night­ly Sin­ga­longs Prove That Music Soothes the Sav­age Beast of Coro­n­avirus Quar­an­tine & Self-Iso­la­tion

A Free Course from MIT Teach­es You How to Speak Ital­ian & Cook Ital­ian Food All at Once

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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A Virtual Tour of Ancient Rome, Circa 320 CE: Explore Stunning Recreations of The Forum, Colosseum and Other Monuments

in Architecture, History, Technology | August 5th, 2020

If you’re a reg­u­lar read­er of this site, you’re like­ly famil­iar with the sim­u­la­tion hypoth­e­sis, the idea that con­scious expe­ri­ence is noth­ing more than a com­put­er pro­gram. This con­cept has many sci-fi impli­ca­tions, from Matrix-like sce­nar­ios to the rad­i­cal idea that every­thing in the uni­verse is soft­ware, run by incom­pre­hen­si­ble beings who might as well be gods. One of the more plau­si­ble ver­sions sug­gests that we are liv­ing in an “ances­tor sim­u­la­tion,” designed by future human soci­eties to recre­ate their past.

Pre­sum­ably, sim­u­lat­ed ances­tors would cre­ate their own ances­tor sim­u­la­tions and so on, ad infini­tum. There’s no way to know where on the con­tin­u­um we fall, but wher­ev­er it is, ances­tor sim­u­la­tions are on the way… maybe. They’re rudi­men­ta­ry at the moment, con­sist­ing of immer­sive video games and VR recre­ations of ancient cities.

Each iter­a­tion, how­ev­er, is bet­ter than the last, as we have seen in the case of Rome Reborn (or Rome Reborn®), a 3D dig­i­tal mod­el­ing project designed to recre­ate the city’s archi­tec­ture as it was in 320 CE, through expert ren­der­ings informed by archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­ans and “vir­tu­al archae­ol­o­gists” like Dr. Bernard Frisch­er, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia.

Back in a 2012 Open Cul­ture post, Matthias Rasch­er explained the sig­nif­i­cance of this year, “when Rome’s pop­u­la­tion had reached its peak (about one mil­lion) and the first Chris­t­ian church­es were being built.” His­to­ri­ans will also rec­og­nize 320 as fol­low­ing direct­ly on the heels of the Dona­tion of Con­stan­tine that gave the city to the Pope. We can tour the vir­tu­al streets of this rapid­ly chang­ing ancient city, though the bur­geon­ing pop­u­la­tion is nowhere in evi­dence. Noth­ing moves, grows, or changes in Rome Reborn. In that sense it is still like so many pre­vi­ous rep­re­sen­ta­tions of antiq­ui­ty.

Now in ver­sion 3.0, Rome Reborn began as a 3D mod­el in 2007, and was first owned by the Regents of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia. It now oper­ates, under the aus­pices of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia, as a pri­vate com­pa­ny called Fly­over Zone. They have oth­er such dig­i­tal recre­ations in their prod­uct line, includ­ing “Athens Reborn®, Hadri­an’s Vil­la Reborn®, Baal­bek Reborn®, Egypt Reborn®, and His­tor­i­cal Games®.” Rome Reborn’s design­er, Dani­la Logi­nov, has released increas­ing­ly detailed pro­mos of the project over the years, and you can see these many videos here.

To ful­ly expe­ri­ence this sim­u­lat­ed Rome, you’ll need a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty head­set. The third ver­sion of the 3D mod­el has been made pub­licly avail­able. “You can immerse your­self in the ancient city and even enter into some of its most famous build­ings while lis­ten­ing to the com­men­tary of high­ly qual­i­fied experts,” the Rome Reborn site promis­es. Famous build­ings one might explore include the Roman forum and the Basil­i­ca of Max­en­tius. It is not an expe­ri­ence based in real­ism. In some of the sim­u­la­tions “you can opt for a whirl­wind  fly­over tour of the city,” notes Meilan Sol­ly at Smith­son­ian.

This rough­ly two-hour tour is like noth­ing any ancient Roman ever expe­ri­enced. “Com­par­a­tive­ly, the two site vis­its place users in the driver’s seat,” Sol­ly writes, “afford­ing them free­dom to roam through recon­struct­ed streets and halls.” It’s not quite the stuff of a sim­u­lat­ed uni­verse just yet, but it may not be too far in the future before Rome Reborn® ful­ly lives up to its name. Learn more about ancient Rome, cir­ca 320 CE, in the videos here, and learn more about Rome Reborn at their offi­cial site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Explore Ancient Athens 3D, a Dig­i­tal Recon­struc­tion of the Greek City-State at the Height of Its Influ­ence

An Ani­mat­ed Recon­struc­tion of Ancient Rome: Take A 30-Minute Stroll Through the City’s Vir­tu­al­ly-Recre­at­ed Streets

French Illus­tra­tor Revives the Byzan­tine Empire with Mag­nif­i­cent­ly Detailed Draw­ings of Its Mon­u­ments & Build­ings: Hagia Sophia, Great Palace & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

 

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Explore the Ruins of Timgad, the “African Pompeii” Excavated from the Sands of Algeria

in Architecture, History | August 4th, 2020

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Fif­teen cen­turies after its fall, the Roman Empire lives on in unex­pect­ed places. Take, for instance, the for­mer colo­nial city of Tim­gad, locat­ed in Alge­ria 300 miles from the cap­i­tal. Found­ed by the Emper­or Tra­jan around 100 AD as Colo­nia Mar­ciana Ulpia Tra­iana Thamu­ga­di, it thrived as a piece of Rome in north Africa before turn­ing Chris­t­ian in the third cen­tu­ry and into a cen­ter of the Donatist sect in the fourth. The three cen­turies after that saw a sack­ing by Van­dals, a reoc­cu­pa­tion by Chris­tians, and anoth­er sack­ing by Berbers. Aban­doned and cov­ered by sand from the Sahara from the sev­enth cen­tu­ry on, Tim­gad was redis­cov­ered by Scot­tish explor­er James Bruce in 1765. But not until the 1880s, under French rule, did a prop­er exca­va­tion begin.

Today a vis­i­tor to the ruins of Tim­gad can see the out­lines of exact­ly where each of its build­ings once stood (espe­cial­ly if they have the aer­i­al view of the pho­to above, recent­ly tweet­ed out by Archi­tec­ture Hub). This, in part, is what qual­i­fied the place for inscrip­tion on UNESCO’s World Her­itage List.

“With its square enclo­sure and orthog­o­nal design based on the car­do and decumanus, the two per­pen­dic­u­lar routes run­ning through the city, it is an excel­lent exam­ple of Roman town plan­ning,” says UNESCO’s web site. Its “remark­able grid sys­tem” — quite nor­mal to 21st-cen­tu­ry city-dwellers, much less so in sec­ond-cen­tu­ry Africa — makes it “a typ­i­cal exam­ple of an urban mod­el” that “con­tin­ues to bear wit­ness to the build­ing inven­tive­ness of the mil­i­tary engi­neers of the Roman civ­i­liza­tion, today dis­ap­peared.”

“With­in a few gen­er­a­tions of its birth,” writes Messy Nessy,” the out­post had expand­ed to over 10,000 res­i­dents of both Roman, African, as well as Berber descent. “The exten­sion of Roman cit­i­zen­ship to non-Romans was a care­ful­ly planned strat­e­gy of the Empire,” she adds. “In return for their loy­al­ty, local elites were giv­en a stake in the great and pow­er­ful Empire, ben­e­fit­ted from its pro­tec­tion and legal sys­tem, not to men­tion, its mod­ern urban ameni­ties such as Roman bath hous­es, the­atres, and a fan­cy pub­lic library.”

Tim­gad’s library, which “would have housed man­u­scripts relat­ing to reli­gion, mil­i­tary his­to­ry and good gov­er­nance,” seems to have been fan­cy indeed, and its ruins indi­cate the pur­chase Roman cul­ture man­aged to attain in this far-flung set­tle­ment.

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Tim­gad’s library is just one ele­ment of what UNESCO calls its “rich archi­tec­tur­al inven­to­ry com­pris­ing numer­ous and diver­si­fied typolo­gies, relat­ing to the dif­fer­ent his­tor­i­cal stages of its con­struc­tion: the defen­sive sys­tem, build­ings for the pub­lic con­ve­niences and spec­ta­cles, and a reli­gious com­plex.” Hav­ing out­grown its orig­i­nal street grid, Tim­gad “spread beyond the perime­ters of its ram­parts and sev­er­al major pub­lic build­ings are built in the new quar­ters: Capi­toli­um, tem­ples, mar­kets and baths,” most of which date from the city’s “Gold­en Age” in the Sev­er­an peri­od between 193 and 235.

Image Alan and Flo­ra Bot­ting via Flickr Com­mons

This makes for an African equiv­a­lent of Pom­peii, the Roman city famous­ly buried and thus pre­served in the explo­sion of Mount Vesu­vius in the year 79. But it is less­er-known Tim­gad, with its still clear­ly laid-out blocks, its rec­og­niz­able pub­lic facil­i­ties, and its demar­cat­ed “down­town” and “sub­urbs,” that will feel more famil­iar to us today, whichev­er city in the world we come from.

via Archi­tec­ture Hub/Messy­Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vis­it Pom­peii (also Stone­henge & Ver­sailles) with Google Street View

Rome Reborn: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour Through Ancient Rome, 320 C.E.

Watch the Destruc­tion of Pom­peii by Mount Vesu­vius, Re-Cre­at­ed with Com­put­er Ani­ma­tion (79 AD)

See the Expan­sive Ruins of Pom­peii Like You’ve Nev­er Seen Them Before: Through the Eyes of a Drone

Pierre Bourdieu’s Pho­tographs of Wartime Alge­ria

Repli­ca of an Alger­ian City, Made of Cous­cous: Now on Dis­play at The Guggen­heim

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Take an 360° Interactive Tour Inside the Great Pyramid of Giza

in Architecture, History | July 31st, 2020

You can’t take it with you if you’ve got noth­ing to take with you.

Once upon a time, the now-emp­ty Great Pyra­mid of Giza was sump­tu­ous­ly appoint­ed inside and out, to ensure that Pharaoh Khu­fu, or Cheops as he was known to the Ancient Greeks, would be well received in the after­life.

Bling was a seri­ous thing.

Thou­sand of years fur­ther on, cin­e­mat­ic por­tray­als have us con­vinced that tomb raiders were greedy 19th- and 20th-cen­tu­ry cura­tors, eager­ly fill­ing their vit­rines with stolen arti­facts.

There’s some truth to that, but mod­ern Egyp­tol­o­gists are fair­ly con­vinced that Khufu’s pyra­mid was loot­ed short­ly after his reign, by oppor­tunists look­ing to grab some good­ies for their jour­ney to the after­life.

At any rate, it’s been picked clean.

Per­haps one day, we 21st-cen­tu­ry cit­i­zens can opt in to a pyra­mid expe­ri­ence akin to Rome Reborn, a dig­i­tal crutch for our fee­ble imag­i­na­tion to help us past the emp­ty sar­coph­a­gus and bare walls that have defined the world’s old­est tourist attraction’s inte­ri­ors for … well, not quite ever, but cer­tain­ly for Flaubert, Mark Twain, and 12th-cen­tu­ry schol­ar Abd al-Latif.

Fast for­ward­ing to 2017, the BBC’s Rajan Datar host­ed “Secrets of the Great Pyra­mid,” a pod­cast episode fea­tur­ing Egyp­tol­o­gist Sal­i­ma Ikram, space archae­ol­o­gist Dr Sarah Par­cak, and archae­ol­o­gist, Dr Joyce Tyldes­ley.

The experts were keen to clear up a major mis­con­cep­tion that the 4600-year-old pyra­mid was built by aliens or enslaved labor­ers, rather than a per­ma­nent staff of archi­tects and engi­neers, aid­ed by Egypt­ian civil­ians eager to barter their labor for meat, fish, beer, and tax abate­ment.

Datar’s ques­tion about a scan­ning project that would bring fur­ther insight into the Pyra­mid of Giza­’s con­struc­tion and lay­out was met with excite­ment.

This attrac­tion, old as it is, has plen­ty of new secrets to be dis­cov­ered.

We’re hap­py to share with you, read­ers, that 3 years after that episode was taped, the future is here.

The scan­ning is com­plete.

Wit­ness the BBC’s 360° tour inside the Great Pyra­mid of Giza.

Use your mouse to crane your neck, if you like.

As of this writ­ing, you could tour the pyra­mid in per­son, should you wish—the usu­al touris­tic hoards are def­i­nite­ly dialed down.

But, giv­en the con­ta­gion, per­haps bet­ter to tour the King’s Cham­ber, the Queen’s Cham­ber, and the Grand Gallery vir­tu­al­ly, above.

(An inter­est­ing tid­bit: the pyra­mid was more dis­tant to the ancient Romans than the Colos­se­um is to us.)

Lis­ten to the BBC’s “Secrets of the Great Pyra­mid” episode here.

Tour the Great Pyra­mid of Giza here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What the Great Pyra­mid of Giza Would’ve Looked Like When First Built: It Was Gleam­ing, Reflec­tive White

How the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids Were Built: A New The­o­ry in 3D Ani­ma­tion

The Met Dig­i­tal­ly Restores the Col­ors of an Ancient Egypt­ian Tem­ple, Using Pro­jec­tion Map­ping Tech­nol­o­gy

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Tony Hawk & Architectural Historian Iain Borden Tell the Story of How Skateboarding Found a New Use for Cities & Architecture

in Architecture, Sports | July 29th, 2020

Would­n’t we enjoy see­ing our cities like an archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an, in com­mand of deep knowl­edge about the tech­nol­o­gy, ide­ol­o­gy, and aes­thet­ics of the build­ings we pass by every day? For most of us, this would huge­ly enrich our expe­ri­ence of the urban envi­ron­ment. But then so, less obvi­ous­ly, would see­ing our cities like a skate­board­er, in com­mand of deep knowl­edge about how to glide, jump, and bounce along the streets, the build­ings, and all the myr­i­ad pieces of infra­struc­ture as a surfer rides the waves. The archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an learns the city with his mind; the skater learns the city, no less painstak­ing­ly, with his body.

The Vox video above brings mind and body come togeth­er in the per­sons of Iain Bor­den, author of Skate­board­ing and the City: A Com­plete His­to­ry, and Tony Hawk, to whom even those whol­ly igno­rant of skate­board­ing need no intro­duc­tion. Their com­ple­men­tary inter­views reveal the his­to­ry of mod­ern skate­board­ing through the sport’s “leg­endary spots”: pub­lic-school cam­pus­es, aban­doned swim­ming pools, dry drainage ditch­es, for­got­ten sec­tions of con­crete pipe. In the main this selec­tion reflects the high­ly sub­ur­ban­ized 1970s in which skate­boards first came to pop­u­lar­i­ty in the Unit­ed States. But at its out­er lim­its, such as the Mt. Baldy pipeline in north­ern Cal­i­for­nia, it also shows how far skaters will go in search of the ide­al place to ride.

Though pur­pose-build skate parks do exist (their num­bers kept low by for­mi­da­ble insur­ance chal­lenges), seri­ous skaters pre­fer spaces not express­ly designed for skat­ing. This is thanks in large part to the inno­va­tions of a skater with less wider-world name recog­ni­tion than Hawk, but no less influ­ence with­in the sport: Natas Kau­pas. Hawk remem­bers the thoughts trig­gered by footage of the young Kau­pas skat­ing mas­ter­ful­ly through his neigh­bor­hood in the 1987 film Wheels of Fire: “Wow, you can skate curbs like that? You can skate bench­es? You can skate fire hydrants? The whole world is a skate park now.” Sud­den­ly, Bor­den adds, “you did­n’t need to be in Cal­i­for­nia, or in the Ari­zona desert, or in Flori­da any­more. You could be any­where.”

Review­ing Bor­den’s Skate­board­ing and the City, Jack Lay­ton in Urban Stud­ies high­lights its his­to­ry of “how the assem­blage of mate­ri­als that makes up cities has been – in count­less ways – re-imag­ined by the skate­board­er to cre­ate accel­er­a­tion, rota­tion, fric­tion and flow.” It’s easy to for­get, Lay­ton writes, that “along with facil­i­tat­ing com­merce, trans­port and habi­ta­tion, cities can be spaces that facil­i­tate play, exhil­a­ra­tion and plea­sure.” Despite often hav­ing been regard­ed as pub­lic nui­sances, skate­board­ers are “a con­stant reminder that our cities are cre­ative and rich places,” says Bor­den. With the excep­tion of the skate parks secret­ly con­struct­ed in hid­den urban spaces across the world, skaters, of course, don’t build the city — but they do show us some of its untapped poten­tial.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ful­ly Flared

3 Icon­ic Paint­ings by Fri­da Kahlo Get Reborn as Vans Skate Shoes

Sax­o­phon­ist Plays into Large Gas Pipes & Then Uses the Echo to Accom­pa­ny Him­self

Every­thing You Ever Want­ed to Know About the Beau­ty of Bru­tal­ist Archi­tec­ture: An Intro­duc­tion in Six Videos

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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An Introduction to Hagia Sophia: After 85 Years as a Museum, It’s Set to Become a Mosque Again

in Architecture, History, Travel | July 13th, 2020

No tour of Istan­bul can fail to include Hagia Sophia. The same is true enough of the British Muse­um in Lon­don or the Lou­vre in Paris, but Hagia Sophia is more than a muse­um: it’s also spent dif­fer­ent stretch­es of its near-mil­len­ni­um-and-a-half of exis­tence as an East­ern Ortho­dox cathe­dral, a Roman Catholic cathe­dral, and a mosque. Stripped of its reli­gious func­tion in the mid-1930s by the admin­is­tra­tion of Pres­i­dent Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, remem­bered for his cre­ation of a sec­u­lar Turk­ish repub­lic, the majes­tic build­ing has spent the past 85 years as not just a muse­um but the coun­try’s top tourist attrac­tion. Now, accord­ing to a decree issued last week by Pres­i­dent Recep Tayyip Erdo­gan, Hagia Sophia will become a mosque again.

“Erdo­gan, like his pre­de­ces­sor Ataturk, appears to be using the fate of the Hagia Sophia to make a polit­i­cal state­ment and score some points with his sup­port­ers,” writes Ars Tech­ni­ca’s Kiona N. Smith. But so did Emper­or Jus­tin­ian I of the East­ern Roman Empire, who “ordered the cathedral’s con­struc­tion in the first place for sim­i­lar rea­sons.”

Built on the site where two cathe­drals had pre­vi­ous­ly stood, both burned down in dif­fer­ent revolts, “the Hagia Sophia has always been as much a polit­i­cal land­mark as a reli­gious or cul­tur­al one — so it’s not sur­pris­ing that it has also changed hands, and func­tions, at least four times in its his­to­ry.” Ataturk’s sec­u­lar­iza­tion of Hagia Sophia entailed a restora­tion of its his­toric fea­tures: “Chris­t­ian mosaics that had been plas­tered over in the late 1400s were care­ful­ly uncov­ered, and they shared the domed space with Mus­lim prayer nich­es and pul­pits.”

You can get a clear­er sense of what the build­ing’s archi­tec­ture and dec­o­ra­tion reveal in the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son at the top of the post. Edu­ca­tor Kel­ly Wall points to, among oth­er fea­tures, the ancient for­ti­fi­ca­tions that “hint at the strate­gic impor­tance of the sur­round­ing city, found­ed as Byzan­tium by Greek colonists in 657 BCE.”; the foun­da­tion stones that “mur­mur tales from their home­lands of Egypt and Syr­ia, while columns tak­en from the Tem­ple of Artemis recall a more ancient past”; and, beneath the gold­en dome that “appears sus­pend­ed from heav­en,” rein­forc­ing Corinthi­an columns, “brought from Lebanon after the orig­i­nal dome was par­tial­ly destroyed by an earth­quake in 558 CE,” that offer a reminder of “fragili­ty and the engi­neer­ing skills such a mar­vel requires.” The BBC 360-degree vir­tu­al tour just above goes into greater detail on these ele­ments and oth­ers.

Accord­ing to reports cit­ed by Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Hakim Bishara, “tourists will still have access to the site, although it might be closed to vis­i­tors dur­ing prayer time.” Still, “art his­to­ri­ans and con­ser­va­tion­ists wor­ry that the Turk­ish author­i­ties might decide to cov­er up or remove the cen­turies-old Byzan­tine mosaics and Chris­t­ian iconog­ra­phy that adorn the cel­e­brat­ed struc­ture, as was done in oth­er con­vert­ed church­es in Turkey in the past.” Good job, then, that irre­press­ible tele­vi­sion trav­el­er Rick Steves has already shot his episode on Istan­bul, which (from 9:34) nat­u­ral­ly fea­tures a vis­it to Hagia Sophia. But whether as a muse­um, cathe­dral, a mosque, or what­ev­er it becomes next, the build­ing will sure­ly remain what Steves called “the high point of Byzan­tine archi­tec­ture” and “the pin­na­cle of that soci­ety’s sixth-cen­tu­ry glo­ry days.” And no leader of Turkey, no mat­ter what their beliefs about church and state, will want the tourists to stop com­ing.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Hagia Sophia’s Awe-Inspir­ing Acoustics Get Recre­at­ed with Com­put­er Sim­u­la­tions, and Let Your­self Get Trans­port­ed Back to the Mid­dle Ages

Hear the Sound of the Hagia Sophia Recre­at­ed in Authen­tic Byzan­tine Chant

French Illus­tra­tor Revives the Byzan­tine Empire with Mag­nif­i­cent­ly Detailed Draw­ings of Its Mon­u­ments & Build­ings: Hagia Sophia, Great Palace & More

Map­ping the Sounds of Greek Byzan­tine Church­es: How Researchers Are Cre­at­ing “Muse­ums of Lost Sound”

The Com­plex Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art & Design: A Short Intro­duc­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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